Public transit is hugely valuable due to the economies of agglomeration it enables and the infrastructure you don’t have to build because of it. It benefits drivers, retail businesses, employers, etc.
An R160 subway car can hold 240 people; they run in 4 or 5 car sets. The E train has 15 trains per hour during peak times, and runs 10 car trains. So that’s a capacity of ~36k people, and it shares tracks with some other lines at various points
A highway lane can support 2.2 k people per hour in free flowing traffic. That single subway line can move as many people as a 16 lane highway, assuming that there’s no bottlenecks at the exits. Plus the cost of all the parking garages for 36k cars.
I know this is a Captain Obvious moment but I’ll bite anyway, just imagine how great it would be if we just socialized public transit and our tax dollars worked for us, instead of trying to incarcerate us.
To quote some other users:
https://lemm.ee/comment/8037570
https://lemm.ee/comment/8033863